The Nation’s Largest JEWISH CLASSIFIEDS (PAGE 45)
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ewish Voice J Deuteronomy 32:1
M AY T H E E A RT H H E A R T H E WO R D S O F M Y M O U TH
January 22nd, 2010 | 7 Shevat 5770
ROME JEWISH LEADER PRESSES POPE ON PIUS XII 'SILENCE'
Vol. 10, Iss. 51
www.JewishVoiceNY.com
WORLD WIDE ACLAIM FOR ISRAEL’S RESCUE EFFORTS IN HAITI
Pope Benedict greeting the Jewish community at the main synagogue in Rome. BY E. B. SOLOMONT
An Italian Jewish leader told Pope Benedict that his wartime predecessor Pius XII should have spoken out more forcefully against the Holocaust to show solidarity with Jews being led to the "ovens of Auschwitz".
Isareli Soldiers of the Home Front Unit, rescuing a government worker from a collasped building in downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He had been trapped for over one hundred hours without food or water.
he comments, from the president of Rome's Jewish community Rabbi Riccardo Pacifici, were made during the pope's first visit to Rome's synagogue and were some of the bluntest ever spoken by a Jewish leader in public to a pope."The silence of Pius XII before and during the Shoah, still hurts because something should have been done," Pacifici told the pope, using the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. "Maybe it would not have stopped the death trains, but it would have sent a signal, a word of extreme comfort, of human solidarity, towards those brothers of ours transported to the ovens of Auschwitz," he said.
Last week’s devastating earthquake in Haiti caused untold damage with the cost in human lives going over the 200,000 mark and monetary damage said to be higher than the yearly budget for the whole country.
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Photo by IDF Spokesperson. BY SHMUEL BEN ELIEZER
he news coming from Haiti in the quake’s aftermath was not good. Homes, schools, prison, Parliament, the local UN headquarters and nearly every medical facility were destroyed trapping thousands under tons of rubble. Haitians started immediately digging for survivors in the mountains of debris that covers most of the capital city of Port-au-Prince. As in most natural disasters around the world, countries have come to the aid of Haiti. The US has sent money,
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personnel and equipment, along with France England, Mexico and dozens of other countries near and far. But for the most part the aid has come to little to late. The one bright light in the stories coming out of Haiti is the Israeli response to the disaster. In almost every story related from the disaster zone that tell of people being found alive and rescued, of emergency medical care being rendered or even babies being born, the one word that is almost always on reporters lips is ISRAEL. Some of the f irst people to arrive Port-Au-Prince, to offer assistance were a group of ZAKA workers from Israel who had been in Mexico working on the recovery efforts for the fatal helicopter crash that claimed the lives of members of the Saba family. ZAKA has become famous for their actions at terrorist
attacks in Israel where they take over the responsibility of gathering all victims and preparing them for burial. They have gained an international reputation for their work in disaster relief efforts. Mostly Chareidi Jews with flowing beards they seemed out of place in the mostly black population of Haiti but among the rubble as they desperately helped search for survivors they were considered angels of mercy. The ZAKA team worked around the clock racing against the time when the operation would turn from being one of a rescue mission to that of a recovery. “It was a Shabbat from hell,” was how Mati Goldstein leader of the ZAKA International Rescue Unit
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